Share this article

Famine or feast: The return of cheap debt, but for how long?

by James Wallace

The days of easy credit have returned to Europe’s stabilised real estate markets at a pace that would have seemed improbable just two years ago when the market was still gripped by the notion of a structural undersupply.

DTZ, author of the contentious bi-annual research paper on the subject, The Funding Gap, calculated in November 2011 that Europe’s base funding gap — that is, the difference between the maturing debt secured by European commercial real estate and the estimated available refinancing capital — was €65 billion. Those calculations, due later this year, are projected to reveal an overall surplus in core European markets, driven by the weight of debt capital raised and available for deployment by non-bank lenders as well as by the en